Call for proposal:

Funding scheme:

SME-1 - SME instrument phase 1

Objective

In Europe, 60% of the forest area is owned by private individuals, who mostly live in cities, not even knowing where their forestry is located. These remote forest owners lack easy tools for understanding and taking control of their forest assets in order to perform proper silvicultural management practices and to harvest and to sell valuable timber and thus contributing to the European economy. Also, as EU forests are under threat by rapid climate change and invasion of alien animal species, major concern of forest authorities is how to encourage forest owners to better manage their assets. MHG developed Wuudis, a cloud-based web service and a mobile solution for forest owners and contractors to effectively manage forest resources remotely in real-time.

Wuudis provides information about the forest and its timber resource; track of executed silvicultural activities and guidance for planning next forest activities that need to be performed in order to gain economic benefit from timber harvest. It enables easy scouting and connection between forest owners and contractors to close e-contracting deals, which saves costs and increases margin for contractors. It also provides automatic reporting and sharing of damage on wood by weather, soil erosion and diseases.

In Phase 1, MHG will assess the economic viability through a realistic bottom-up approach in which the number of reachable forest owners and contractors will be estimated according to in progress and existing contacts with stakeholders in the forest industry. The technical viability will be assessed through the involvement of organizations (government, profit or non-profit) with access to national electronic forest data and GIS data in Finland, Czech Republic, Spain and Belgium.